Black–white differences in beliefs about the U.S. restaurant tipping norm: Moderated by socio-economic status?

A re-analysis of two national telephone surveys found that black–white differences in awareness that it is customary to tip a percentage of the bill declined as socio-economic status increased. However, black–white differences in awareness that is customary to tip 15–20 percent in restaurants was unrelated to socio-economic status. The practical as well as theoretical implications of these findings are discussed along with directions for future research.     

The role of family decision makers in festival tourism

This study assessed the role of family decision makers in participating in a festival according to five stages of festival participation. A survey process was conducted using two sampling groups: the sample for families with children and the sample for families without children. According to the results of the study, a number of marketing implications were generated. For example, the husband was revealed to more actively join transportation-related activities including driving, deciding travel routes, automobile safety checks, and filling up with gasoline. The wife was a strong decision maker in selecting restaurants or menus in the festival tourism management process. Likewise, the role of the wife is very significant, from suggesting the festival participation at the first stage to determining a revisit to the festival at the last stage. However, the children or joint decision-making patterns were not distinctive as they are said to be in other tourism literature. Findings of the study are expected to offer valuable insights for all festival stakeholders including festival vendors, local government, local residents, and festival organizers.     

Longitudinal analysis of self-employment follow-through

The Hungarian economy was based on central planning for several decades and in comparison with the dominance of the great organizations that consisted of many smaller units, the role of small-sized enterprises was marginal. The change in the political climate involved recognition of and belief in entrepreneurship and the new legal system increased the opportunity for setting up new enterprises established on private and joint capital. Nevertheless, the changes in the organizational system of companies within the national economy appear to concentrate in time and territory in Northern Hungary. Increasing unemployment inspires the start of numerous enterprises even when the experience of entrepreneurship is missing and, in addition, the inclination towards it. This may result in difficulties and danger and a study of North Hungarian small businesses is therefore useful.

The aim of this research is to examine the position of SMEs in the North Hungarian industrial area, concentrating on questions that can not be answered by means of traditional statistics. Data were collected by surveying questionnaires. The questions referred to the development of SMEs in North Hungary.

Finally, the elements in the economic environment that may hinder or help successful operation of the enterprises were analysed. With the experience gained by our investigation we would like to help in the reinforcement of SMEs working in Northern Hungary.     

Thailand as a tourist destination: Perceptions of international visitors and Thai residents

In the tourism industry, the perceptions of a tourist destination are critical to its image. Image can be either a mental image of a product created by a marketing department or an associative image of a product that is developed by the consumer. Tourism destinations must be careful about their image so the perception that they have is not different from the way that they are perceived by potential travelers. This study examines the perceptions of international visitors and Thai residents on the image of Thailand as a tourist destination. International visitors and Thai residents were both surveyed to determine their perceptions of the image of Thailand. Some results of the study found that Thai residents and international visitors felt cultural sightseeing, friendly people and food were significantly important when thinking of Thailand as a tourist destination, while international visitors felt that nightlife and entertainment were significantly more important than that of Thai residents.     

Future S&T management policy issues—2025 global scenarios

This article presents four scenarios depicting science and technology (S&T) management dilemmas of the next two decades. The scenarios concern the balance between risk and promise, between the need to steer the directions of S&T, to minimize risk, and the need to maintain a free and unconstrained S&T agenda. These scenarios were constructed in the third year of the Millennium Project's study of this topic. The scenarios were formed in an interactive process with the project's international participants. The key policies that were found to be useful in all of the scenarios include (1) when considering the possibility of the misuse of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists, include the possibility of misuse by a single individual, acting alone; (2) establish mechanisms and techniques for making possible the explicit unintended consequences of scientific research and technology, including malicious uses; (3) for desirable technologies, where it may not be possible to avoid significant risks, develop mitigation strategies in parallel; (4) teach science ethics.     

An introduction to the Millennium Project

The pace, complexity, and globalization of change requires attention to the future. The change of millennia — the coming of the year 2001 — provides an opportunity, a psychological focus, for a global review of past achievements and problems and a unique chance to assess and reflect on future issues and opportunities.Unfortunately, there is as yet no mechanism or information utility to support a worldwide effort to study past achievements and problems or future issues and opportunities. Although there are many individual, isolated, special purpose, and one-time study efforts underway, there is no international system that can provide coherence or continuity to these studies, including feedback and sharing of information, and, in particular, the systematic exploration of future possibilities and policy alternatives. With growing interest in the future, the spread of instantaneous and global communications, the advent of powerful new nondeterministic modeling techniques, the ability to evoke, capture, and share information and perceptions with systematic questioning techniques and software, the proliferation of data bases, and knowledge visualization, it is now possible for futurists, scholars and others around the world to interact globally and take a fresh look at the future possibilities and policies in ways not previously possible.As the World Bank provides an ongoing system for research and feedback to improve economic policy, so too the United Nations University could provide an ongoing system for the improvement of futures research and its application to the policy process. According to a series of interviews, questionnaires, and meetings with leading futurists and scholars around the world, the proposed “Millenium Project” has the potential to become such a system.This study had as its principal objective determining the design of an information system that could effectively tap contributors, worldwide, to focus on lessons of the past that bear on world issues and the potential of future developments for intensifying or mitigating these and future issues. The first phase of the feasibility study was both methodological and substantive. Worldwide panels of experts contributed their judgments about the method or process of organizing the project; and the system that emerged from this interaction was applied in a prototype study to the issues of growing world population and the environment.During the first phase of the feasibility study, we found that:

1. 1. The Millennium Project is feasible and likely to be helpful to many institutions in examining and resolving policy issues at several levels. An overview of the project design and objectives appears in Section 2 of this article.

2. 2. Organizations that have an issues scanning function, or have a mandate to keep abreast of a broad range of futures thinking, have a need for access to a non-political, scholarly, and international system of future studies. Such organizations have requested continued participation in the second and third phase of this feasibility study, as well as establishing formal relations with the full Millennium Project.

3. 3. While several questions remain, the design features of a system to collect judgments using the Delphi process that were suggested by the international panel (outlined elsewhere in this report) form a straight forward operational system. Among the remaining questions are the design and use of international information systems and data bases, integration with quantitative techniques such as system modeling, the requirements for special study teams, and institutionalization and financial support. The design of the operational system is described in detail in Section 3 of this report.

4. 4. Cost estimates have been made for establishing international panels and collecting and analyzing information they provide using the Delphi process. Several assumptions are required. If a maximum of four topics are addressed in a particular year, each of the four panels consists of 150–200 people, the staff is kept to a base of three people with an additional 1.5 per panel, and advisors are paid an honorarium of $1.500, then the cost of this element of the full scale Project is likely to be approximately $900,000 per year. While communications modes are important in terms of timing and information access, the costs of communications are the smallest of the Project's cost elements. Detail of our cost estimates appear in Section 7 of this report.

This is not the final feasibility study report, but only a report on part of Phase I. As such, it contains our initial findings about how the Project might be organized. We welcome comments from the reader. Please consider this as work in progress.     

REPORTING GUIDELINES FOR META-ANALYSIS IN ECONOMICS

Meta-analysis has become the conventional approach to synthesizing the results of empirical economics research. To further improve the transparency and replicability of the reported results and to raise the quality of meta-analyses, the Meta-Analysis of Economics Research Network has updated the reporting guidelines that were published by this Journal in 2013. Future meta-analyses in economics will be expected to follow these updated guidelines or give valid reasons why a meta-analysis should deviate from them.     

Approximate tâtonnement processes

Summary We introduce a probabilistic model for price adjustment in an exchange economy which approximates the classical Walras tâtonnement process while avoiding many of its unrealistic features. The model is decentralized in that the trades permitted to an agent and the resulting price changes depend only on the commodity vector currently held by that agent, and not on the commodity vectors held by the other agents in the economy. Our results will show that the Walras tâtonnement process can be decentralized without changing its behavior on the macroeconomic scale. Our model has a finite set of commodities, a market maker who adjusts prices, and a large finite set of agents who trade only with the market maker. Each agent has a demand function depending on his commodity vector and the price vector. At each discrete time, one agent is chosen at random and exchanges his current commodity vector for his demand vector. Then the market maker adjusts the price vector by an amount which depends on the selected agent's commodity vector and the current price. Prices are adjusted rapidly enough to avoid prolonged trading at the wrong price, but slowly enough so that a substantial price change will depend on a significant simple of agents. The main result shows that with probability arbitrarily close to one the price will rapidly approach and then remain close to an equilibrium value, following a path which is close to the price path of the corresponding tâtonnement process.